Hacker News: lifebeyondfife

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners"

lifebeyondfife — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 06:59:07 +0000

Can jump straight to https://www.ioccc.org/2025/#inventory

The Three Layers of Software Engineering

lifebeyondfife — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:08:25 +0000

Article URL: https://layers.lifebeyondfife.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47859686

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The Three Layers of Software Engineering

lifebeyondfife — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:08:33 +0000

Article URL: https://layers.lifebeyondfife.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47853096

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Generating sudokus for fun and no profit"

lifebeyondfife — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:57:54 +0000

You're correct, the horizontal and vertical flips for the square, are already accounted for in the wreath product. And I miscounted the products themselves. Up to 1.2*10^12 symmetries.

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Generating sudokus for fun and no profit"

lifebeyondfife — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 05:42:33 +0000

The exponential number of symmetries present in sudoku problems, means that once you've found one valid instance, you've actually found up to 9! * 3!^4 * 8 which are exactly the same.

The numbers themselves are all interchangeable, so you have 9! combinations: 362,880.

Columns 1-to-3 are all interchangeable, as are 4-to-6, and 7-to-9. On top of this, these blocks of columns (1-to-3, 4-to-6, 7-to-9) are all interchangeable. Read about wreath products in group theory to know more. Each of the above symmetries are 3!, combined to yield 3! * 3! = 36 combinations. As well as the columns though, the rows have the same property, so those can be combined too: 36 * 36 = 1,296.

Finally, there are the symmetries of a square. Combining all rotations and flips yields a further 8.

In total, sudoku has 3,762,339,840 symmetries. Owing to the starting state of the sudoku puzzle being incomplete, the orbit of the set of points (more group theory) will be smaller than 3 billion, but it provides an efficient method of recreating many more puzzles with the same property. In this case, human complexity.

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Travle: A daily game – get between countries in as few guesses as possible"

lifebeyondfife — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 20:54:17 +0000

You can use the waybackmachine. This works for Worldle as well.

http://web.archive.org/web/20231127182010/https://imois.in/g...

Stop Saying Tech Debt

lifebeyondfife — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 11:06:36 +0000

Article URL: https://lifebeyondfife.com/stop-saying-tech-debt/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36834269

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "How to do the thing you've been avoiding"

lifebeyondfife — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 18:21:00 +0000

Wait, But Why? has a fascinating series of posts on this. https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...

I bought the 52x90 poster where each square is a week of your life. I've filled in significant events. It helps me ensure I keep working on making those events coming.

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused (2018)"

lifebeyondfife — Sat, 27 May 2023 11:03:06 +0000

Plug for my Constraint Solver if anyone wants a simple example https://github.com/lifebeyondfife/Decider

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Show HN: Learn Python with Minecraft"

lifebeyondfife — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 10:14:53 +0000

When I worked at Skyscanner, we'd volunteer at events where high school kids would be shown tech stuff. We'd setup Raspberry Pis with Minecraft on them and show them some basics of running Python scripts to alter the world (with the conclusion being programmatically create loads of dynamite blocks and explode them). Then at the end of the session, give every kid their own Raspberry Pi.

It was interesting reaching the occasional child who assumed this kind of thing wasn't for them.

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "What We Learned from Building GovSlack"

lifebeyondfife — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 10:41:18 +0000

Only US citizens are permitted to deploy code to the US government production servers, or look at the telemetry from those servers.

(I'm a UK citizen, based in the UK, and I have local colleagues supporting products that are deployed to both commercial .com, and US .gov domains. They deploy to .com themselves, but another team based in the US deploy to .gov)

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Today is the 1000th day of March, 2020"

lifebeyondfife — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 14:29:11 +0000

The pandemic is ongoing, but despite its lasting impacts e.g. hybrid or remote is the norm, many things are back to normal. One thousand days out, how are things for you?

Today is the 1000th day of March, 2020

lifebeyondfife — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 14:29:11 +0000

Article URL: https://cov.idmar.ch/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33742656

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

What are your engineering culture values?

lifebeyondfife — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 07:12:22 +0000

Article URL: https://lifebeyondfife.com/what-are-your-engineering-culture-values/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33728554

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?"

lifebeyondfife — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 13:25:31 +0000

I created a CloudFormation script specifically to do this (including CloudFront for CDN). Yes, there's reasonable complexity, but it's a trade-off of security and configuration. As others noted, the documentation is good, and this took me a weekend to write including learning CloudFormation from scratch.

https://github.com/lifebeyondfife/simple-static-website

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Ask HN: What mental models do you use everyday?"

lifebeyondfife — Sun, 21 Nov 2021 20:45:21 +0000

Budget: how many are working on the project? Features: what should the project do? Timeliness: when do you want the project done?

You get to choose only two.

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Show HN: Simple CDN backed static website in AWS"

lifebeyondfife — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 17:51:44 +0000

You're correct, yes, I didn't realise how generous the free tier is. If you're doing fewer than 500 updates per month, Cloudflare looks good https://pages.cloudflare.com/

Because I have other resources and projects in AWS I'll keep this setup. It's so close to free that cost doesn't bother me.

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Show HN: Simple CDN backed static website in AWS"

lifebeyondfife — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 17:44:34 +0000

Familiarity with S3, Route53, and CloudFront was a draw for me personally.

AWS is all about abstractions. Some of them are worth learning but increasingly there's a wall of options in AWS and, for me, it's not worth spending time staying on top of all of them. The few services needed for this setup are some of the most popular and will be there in the future.

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Show HN: Simple CDN backed static website in AWS"

lifebeyondfife — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 17:15:11 +0000

Nothing particularly novel but the setup of configuring CloudFront to connect to S3 and handle SSL termination, a DNS record pointing to CloudFront, an S3 bucket to hold the contents, an S3 bucket security policy which restricts access just to CloudFront... well, it's complex and easy to misconfigure.

In terms of pricing, you can store 1GB in S3 for a year for a fraction of a dollar. The majority of the cost comes from CloudFront. Unless you have serious traffic, this is extremely cheap:

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

The interface (just put files in S3) suits me. I have a site where I deploy and invalidate the CloudFront cache in a GitHub Action: https://github.com/lifebeyondfife/whisky-menu/blob/master/.g...

New comment by lifebeyondfife in "Show HN: Simple CDN backed static website in AWS"

lifebeyondfife — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 17:03:15 +0000

Cloudflare Pages looks like a more productionised version of this, yes.

In terms of advantages, I'd say price, and the maturity of using AWS. I deploy a static site with a GitHub Action (look at my other repo whisky-menu for how to do this) which builds a React app, copies it to S3, and invalidates the CloudFront cache.